Antinori: Keeping It All In The Family

Family Has Run Wineries For 623 Years, With No Plans To Sell

(CBS)  When an Antinori wishes to seek solace, or a place for quiet contemplation, or even a place to confess his earthly sins, it's hardly difficult. Just leave the Palazzo Antinori and, traffic notwithstanding, cross the Piazza Antinori, and within minutes, arrive at the Capella Antinori, the Antinori family chapel, where they might visit the tomb of Alessandro Antinori, one of the founders of the dynasty. And perhaps a nod to any number of Antinoris buried beneath the chapel floor. If wealth and history can buy you one lasting pleasure, it is convenience.

Marchese Antinori, for instance, commutes by helicopter to his most famous vineyard, Tignanello, in the Tuscan countryside south of Florence. There, the family developed the red wines for which they're famous.

But as the experience with the British partners showed, it's no business for the impatient or for those who have a taste for the quick buck. Ten years can pass from the time a new vine is planted until its wine comes to market. "You have to be patient. And to wait until the wine is good enough, the vines are old enough to produce a good wine," Antinori explains.

Tignanello is but one of the Antinori postcard-perfect estates. Castella della Sala is another, halfway between Rome and Florence. There, Albiera went to work after high school, living at the family’s grand 14th century castle, but learning the wine trade from the bottom up, as a field hand in the vineyards.

There she got her hands dirty. "It was the first place where I really started to understand what was going on, I mean, the whole process."

But it's not all dirt and business. There's the other estate, Guado al Tasso on the Tuscan coast.

"I did my own stable," Allegra Antinori tells Safer. "My own training track in the middle of the vineyards. And I go riding every morning. It's beautiful. I love it."

Asked if she's spoiled, she admits, "Yes. I am very spoiled. But I think we appreciate what we have."

And they are constantly reminded that in this line of work, nature always has the last word. The Antinori found the 2002 crop wasn't up to par, and didn't bother bottling most of it.

"You cannot force things. You cannot force nature. If you have a bad vintage, tough luck," Albiera Antinori explains. "We can wake it up for a second before we put it back to sleep."

Every few months, they check on the progress of their wine, fast asleep in the cellars.

Every once in a while someone offers to buy them out. But this farmer and his daughters politely decline, on the theory that if family ownership was good enough in 1385, it's good enough today.

"It is really our intention to remain a family business because we think that this is the best solution for us," Piero Antinori says.

Asked if his family business will last for at least for another 500 years, Antinori laughs and says, "At least."